


Last Words

by MyVantilene



Category: Percy Jackson and the Olympians - Rick Riordan, The Heroes of Olympus - Rick Riordan
Genre: Alternate Universe - Reincarnation, Gen, M/M, Reincarnation, Reset Universe, it's ambiguous really
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-09-27
Updated: 2014-09-27
Packaged: 2018-02-18 22:46:56
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,116
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2364803
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MyVantilene/pseuds/MyVantilene
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>No matter what universe, what life, what incarnation, there are some things that never change.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Last Words

**Author's Note:**

> The summary actually has nothing to do with anything I just couldn't think of a better one.  
> I posted this on tumblr like... two months ago? And I said I'd post here but just kept putting it off so. Here you are.

Nico’s first word is Sorry.  
Maria tells her relatives this over speakerphone while she cooks dinner, explains the story of how Nico’s first intelligible syllables came a mere weeks after he was born.  
When he hears her talking, he doesn’t hesitate to correct her.  
“They were my last words.” He says innocently enough.  
It should surprise Maria but she’s been through this with Bianca, knows herself what it’s like to be just a little bit off.  
“Well, we’ll do it better this time around, won’t we, my angel?” She replies, taking the phone off speaker and angling it away from her mouth.  
Nico learns to read and write as quickly as Bianca had before him.  
“The words don’t get mixed up anymore.” He gleefully tells Maria. She asks him when they were mixed up. He frowns and shrugs, before, he says. Maria understands. She has the language of a country she’s never visited at her disposal. She hasn’t quite figured out why, but she has her assumptions. She slips into Italian, accidentally, instinctively, and suddenly it’s not just syllables but another life on her tongue, she can taste it, honey and ashes, sugar and blood, sweet and metallic.  
She remembers love and death. But it seems like her children only remember the latter.  
“Do you want to leave me?” Nico asks his sister while they’re playing dolls at recess. The other kids don’t talk to them, so they have their own corner of woodchips to act out action movies with Barbies. Bianca looks to him with ancient eyes, full of omniscience in a way that scares her teachers.  
“I understand if you do,” he continues matter-of-factly, “I would leave me too if I could.”  
Bianca lets his Barbie win the fight and uses her lunch money to buy him ice cream in lieu of an actual answer. They both know that she will eventually, sure of it like the sun rising every day. No matter what universe, what reincarnation, it’s as certain as the earth’s rotation that she will leave.  
Maria dies when Nico’s eight and Bianca’s ten.  
They move before a social worker can come to claim them. When they’re on the streets of New York, and Bianca only has enough money saved to feed one of them, he insists she be the one to eat. There’s a flicker of light in him, proof he’s actually a living eight-year-old boy and not a ghost haunting the city that never sleeps, a little part of him that refuses to be left behind. Maybe this time he can do better, be better. He won’t be a weight on her shoulders, he won’t be the burden that breaks her, he’ll make her love him more than the first time around. And maybe Bianca won’t want to leave.  
What a naïve thought.  
Nico’s ten and he cries every night. It’s coming. He knows that it is. The past ten years have felt like seventy and he knows that after Bianca leaves, the years will only get longer, more unbearable.  
Eventually his bubble has to pop. Bianca at least sends him to his father’s. She gives him a farewell kiss as she sheds the responsibility that has kept her down all these years and promises to call but Nico has schooled his face into stone so he won’t cry.  
He cries anyway.  
His father’s house is huge, and he stuffs Nico up in the attic so his wife will never see him. Sometimes he’s brought meals, sometimes he eats them, sometimes he doesn’t. Most of the time he doesn’t. He feels like a prisoner, trapped in the dark with no view of the outside world. He starts talking to himself, just to hear a human voice, just to feel like someone’s listening. By the time his father manages to break the news to his step mom, Nico’s stomach is concave and his bones visible, twenty pounds of vital weight missing. No one cares one way or another, not enough to take him to the doctor or to ask if he’s alright. He misses Bianca and Maria. He would miss home, except he’s never had a real one.  
Other people have it worse than him, he supposes, and he really ought to be grateful, but the only appreciation life will ever extract from him is when he finally dies and stays dead.  
He meets Percy Jackson on the subway while he’s running errands for his dad. Those unsettlingly green eyes focus on him for a half a second, and he feels a rush of joy and a jolt of pain and then Percy Jackson is walking out of his life just as quickly as he came into it, wrapping an arm around a tall blonde and getting off at the next station.  
Fitting, Nico thinks, that no matter what universe they find themselves in, Anna — what was the other part of her name? He swore he knew — will always be the apple of his eye. The same way Nico will always be just blip, an afterthought in the grand scheme of Percy Jackson’s life.  
Nico tries with his father. He gets all A’s, he cleans the house once a week, he helps the servants with the laundry load and the dishes and the meals, he takes up a lot of odd jobs that social services doesn’t know anything about, he gives all of his earning back to them, so, so desperate to please.  
Nothing he does is ever good enough, no amount of effort could ever make them love him. His father’s eyes are cold, his step mother’s eyes even colder, and Nico has forgotten what being warm feels like.  
They kick him out of the house at age fourteen.  
All of his belongings fit in a drawstring bag and they drop him off at the bus station with only six dollars to his name.  
Bus tickets are eight dollars.  
He doesn’t cry this time. He had known it was coming.  
He sleeps at the bus station and in back alleyways and mattress stores before they kick him out. He refuses to beg, not because his pride won’t allow it, but because he doesn’t believe in taking things he hasn’t earned, and he still has his odd jobs anyhow.  
One day a pretty college girl comes into his work, asking the manager where she could find Nico di Angelo. The employee in question almost trips over his own feet answering his boss’s call.  
“This ya sister?” She asks.  
“Half-sister.” The girl corrects.  
“Uh…” he catches the familiar glint in her golden eyes and nods, “Yeah.”  
She waits at one of the empty tables for his shift to end. It’s a slow day and she orders a pastrami sandwich and takes two bites before abandoning in favor of watching traffic through the windows.  
Nico sits down across from her.  
“Hazel.” He says, and he knows he was attached to her once, that he’ll be attached again, and he knows it’s too soon to ask but he wants to know if she’d like to leave him. It’s a bad habit of his, always wondering when someone will grow tired of him again, always wondering if anyone out there actually wants to stay. He knows that Hazel won’t be different but he can pretend as long as she can.  
She smiles.  
“You seem… younger.” She says.  
“You seem older.”  
“I’m twenty-one.” She shrugs.  
“…Almost fifteen.”  
“So fourteen then?”  
“Shh, my employer is right behind that counter.”  
“Hmm,” she hums, smiling, “So how much do you remember?”  
He doesn’t have to ask for a better question. He knows exactly what she’s talking about  
“Vague feelings, names, dates when I know things will go wrong for me. Is it the same for you?”  
“Mostly. I’ve lived past when I was supposed to die, unfortunately my mom didn’t.”  
“Are you really my half sister?”  
“Yup. I’ve only met our father once, though. I understand you’re living with him now?”  
Nico shakes his head.  
“I got kicked out a couple months ago.”  
“Where are you staying now?” Her voice is riddled with concern and he wants to melt in it, when was the last time anyone worried about him? When he was ten?  
But he can’t melt into it, he’s too rough around the edges, too armored to be anything but apathetic. If he starts to care, he can be hurt.  
“Nowhere really,” he shrugs, “Mattress Firm doesn’t even let me through the door anymore. But the park has woodchips and they’re not so bad if I put my jacket over it.”  
She puts a hand to her chest and looks at Nico as if he’s a kicked puppy. The thing is Nico’s not a puppy, he’s a wolf, a hyena, something feral and dangerous, his teeth sharpened into daggers and his eyes wild with hunger. And he hasn’t been kicked, he’s just going solo. Indefinitely.  
“Alright, that’s it,” she says, gathering her things, “You’re coming home with me and I’m going to make shrimp gumbo and we’re going watch Netflix, okay?”  
Nico doesn’t protest.  
They spend the night swapping life stories, making gumbo, and trying to piece together how they fit in each other’s past lives.  
“You were thirteen when I… I rescued you from something, I think, I’m not sure what, but I was fourteen then, too. Why are you older in this life?”  
“Because I think you have the wrong idea about this,” she says, adding a couple more spices to the mix, “It’s not necessarily a different life, I think we’re in a different universe.”  
“Do you remember your last words?”  
She shook her head.  
“Do you?”  
“Yeah. Me, Mama, and Bianca all did. Why is that?”  
“I’m not sure, maybe you get it from your mom. What were they, by the way? Your last words?”  
He swallows thickly.  
“Sorry.”  
There’s more to it than that, but he doesn’t feel like explaining to his newly found half-sister that with his dying breath he apologized for not dying sooner.  
“Hey, Hazel, is dinner re—”  
A blonde pauses in the doorway of the kitchenette.  
“Is that… Is that Nico?” he asks breathlessly, like Nico’s a celebrity who happened to drop by. He’s over to Nico’s barstool in seconds, wrapping his arms around him and burying his nose in his shoulder. Then he springs off him as if he’d been burned.  
“Sorry, sorry, forgot you don’t like to be touched.”  
“How did you kn—”  
“Jason, get the others. Dinner’ll be served in five.”  
“Okay.” He shot one last look at Nico before disappearing into the house.  
“You live with other people?”  
“Three other people. Reyna, Frank, and Jason.”  
“So this is like a condensed Camp Jupiter.”  
“You remember Camp Jupiter?”  
“Maybe. I don’t know. How old is everyone here?”  
“Jason and Reyna are fifteen. Actually, no, Reyna just had a birthday, so she’s sixteen and so is Frank.”  
Jason comes back with Reyna and Frank in tow, and he completely disregards the table in favor of talking to Nico.  
“Do you remember me?” he asks excitedly. Nico doesn’t want to disappoint him, but Jason’s face isn’t bringing any memories to the surface. He just looks familiar, like he might’ve bumped into him on the street, but there’s something about him that puts Nico on edge. He feels like this boy once had the power to destroy him, and he can’t remember what he did with it.  
At the same time, his eyes are so hopeful and his smile is so pretty and Nico can’t believe someone like Jason even remembers someone like him. In the back of his mind he’s still wondering if this boy wants to stay with him or leave him, in the back of his mind he’s still afraid of being left behind again, of being ditched, please don’t leave, his brain seems to shout and he can’t mute it no matter how much he tries.  
Then he spots the scar on Jason’s lip, and he starts to laugh.  
“What? Is there something on my face?” He asks worriedly, and Nico thinks it’s the cutest thing in the world.  
“Yeah.” He laughs and Jason rubs at his chin, as if trying to remove a spot of chocolate from his golden skin.  
“No, no, I mean the scar on your lip. You tried to eat a stapler when you were younger, I remember you told me that once.”  
“I did,” Jason nodded, smiling so sweetly, and he spills out in a rush, “We went out for milkshakes after we killed that Minotaur and you ordered chocolate because you said you never had it and you ended up hating it so you gave it to me, and I told you about my scar and you told me about the time you were turned into a daffodil.”  
“No…” Nico says, scratching his jaw line, “I loved that chocolate milkshake. I gave it to you because you gulped yours down in .2 seconds and kept glancing over at mine.”  
And then his words sink in.  
“I turned into a daffodil?”  
Jason shrugs.  
“Past lives are tricky like that.”  
“Alternate universes.” Hazel corrects, taking a big steel pot off the stove and hefting it over to the dinner table.  
“I think it’s more like a reset.” Reyna throws in.  
“Or we’re all just crazy.” Frank shrugs.  
“Not all of us can be crazy,” Hazel puffs, “We remember each other.”  
“Then one of us is crazy, and the rest of us are just part of their imagination.”  
Hazel leans over and pinches him in the arm.  
“Did that feel imaginary?”  
“Point taken.” He mumbles, rubbing the wound on his forearm.  
Dinner is a nice little affair, or at least nice by Nico’s standards because the last home cooked sit-down meal he had his dad told him he had to be out of the house by midnight.  
There’s a spare bedroom right next to Hazel’s, and the bed is soft and sturdy and he practically melts against the sheets.  
However, not even cotton blankets and silky bedding can dull the wake-up-now-or-risk-getting-killed mentality he picked up on the streets. His door only has to crack an inch and he’s on his feet, pushing the intruder against the wall.  
“…Jason?” he blinks dumbly for a while before letting go of him.  
He narrows his eyes.  
“What are you doing up?”  
“Um, I… I wanted to talk to you,” he stammers, moving his hands every which way, “I wasn’t going to steal something or anything.”  
“No,” Nico sighs, his shoulders rounding, “No, I know you weren’t. It’s just… a bad habit.”  
He wanders back to the blankets and motions for Jason to sit with him.  
“So what did you want to talk about?”  
“I, uh,” Jason hesitantly follows suit, sitting Indian style on the coral bedspread, “I wanted to know what you remember about your past life. I mean, what you remember about me in your past life.”  
Nico shrugs.  
“I remember we went on a lot of trips together… to fight things, I think. Little stories here and there but I can’t remember where we ended up. Why? What do you remember about me?”  
“You… were one of the strongest people I ever knew,” something in his demeanor shifts, his initial nerves smoothed over by sincerity, “You were so compassionate and dedicated, you always went the extra mile even when no one gave you any recognition, and even when no one expected you to. I was scared you would be different in this life, or that I wouldn’t find you, but you’re exactly the way I remember.”  
“Oh.” Is all Nico can say to that significant gut-spillage.  
“But you… you always had a hard time seeing the good in yourself, and you would tell me that I didn’t understand anything, which I guess was true, but I did want to understand, b-but I don’t think… I got the chance to. Something bad happened. I think you…Well, I think you died.”  
Nico just nods solemnly. He’s had a suspicion, a sinking feeling in his bones that maybe he had died alone, with no one to mourn him and no one to know, but supposedly there had been Jason. He can’t remember anyone with him in his final moments, not that he can exactly revision them with 100% accuracy, but still. He thinks he would remember someone like Jason better.  
“How did I die?”  
“I…I don’t remember. I’m sorry.”  
Nico just nods again. He figured Jason wouldn’t know, and even if he did Nico doubts he actually wants to hear about it.  
“Were we… close?”  
Here Jason makes a pained expression, like he has to choose which limb to saw off.  
“Well… I like to think so. There was still a lot of stuff you kept me in the dark about.” There’s no resentment in his voice, nothing acidic or accusing, just an honest recount of where they left off.  
“I wouldn’t sweat it,” he smiles bitterly, because even if Jason’s not going to name blame, Nico certainly knows who it was holding them back, “I’m not necessarily the easiest person to get close to.”  
“Yeah, but if I had cared less about what you thought of me and more about how you were actually doing, I — I just… I could’ve done more. I could’ve gone the extra mile too, but…”  
Nico waits for him to finish the thought but his syllables just deteriorate into these tiny, half-muffled sobs and something wraps itself around Nico’s heart and squeezes, like it’s trying to take something back as recompense for making this poor boy cry. Once upon a time, Jason did have the power to destroy him and now that the shoe’s on the other foot Nico has no idea what to do with it all, with the ability to break bones like snapping toothpicks and it’s a terrible moment where all he does is stare, trying desperately to remember how Jason could’ve used something like that for good.  
He settles on putting a hand to Jason’s heaving back, he thinks about what he had said earlier about caring more about what he thought than how he was, allows the words to peel back all his protective layers, just for a moment, just this once and he says,  
“It’s okay. It’s — it’s better than okay, we can start over. None of the complications, or walls just you and me relearning whatever it was he had. And I won’t leave if you don’t.”  
Jason hiccups and smiles, taking Nico’s hand into his own and repeating,  
“I won’t leave if you don’t.”  
And that’s how Nico di Angelo finally silences the pesky little voice in his head.


End file.
